Short Cuts: Episode I 
The Rise and Fall (and Rise and Fall) of Marcy Rogers
In the name of charity, she maneuvered her way to the top of Dallas Society—then came those inconvenient questions about money. Twice.
s mariness says: It’s easy to question everyone’s motives but in reality it appears that she actually did some good for some needy people and the dollar figures cited related to her alleged abuses are trivial. Her detractors seem particularly vicious-is it jealousy or just negativity at work here... (February 5th, 2012 at 3:58pm)
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In 1986 Ken Sayler had reconstructed the face of Jermaine Gardner, a three-year-old black piano prodigy from Baltimore. Jermaine had been born with a mid line facial cleft, which blinded him and caused his forehead to protrude. The foundation had paid for related costs but not directly for the operation; his parents had private medical insurance. Even so, his dramatic surgery became a potent symbol for Marcy and Ken Sayler’s foundation.
Marcy promoted the cause of children like Jermaine on humanitarian grounds, but what she didn’t especially care to advertise was that medical treatment for most of these children is nearly always available, through either the insurance policies of their parents or the various crippled children’s programs that exist in almost every state, including Texas. Even those children who fall through the cracks can usually find doctors to donate their services. This means that in the United States, there is not a great need to raise money for surgical costs. Far more important are funds for airplane tickets, hotel rooms and food, car rides back and forth to the hospital, speech pathology, and counseling. But Marcy knew the path to the public’s heart. Her message was calculated for blunt emotional appeal: She needed money to fix the kids’ faces. In 1984, through her volunteer work with TACA, Marcy met city council member and mayor-to-be Annette Strauss. A veteran player on the Dallas charity scene, Strauss was impressed with Marcy’s work and used her social and political connections to smooth Marcy’s entrée into the best circles. While Marcy was setting up a women’s auxiliary for the foundation, Strauss hosted an afternoon tea at the Douglas Avenue mansion of her nephew’s wife, society queen Diana Strauss. In no time, the address book for Marcy’s auxiliary was a register of blue-chip distaff Dallas: Katherine Bull, Cynthia Melnick, Nancy Halbreich, Caroline Rose Hunt, Virginia Nick.
In the early eighties, the social climb in status-happy Dallas was never-ending. Being seen wasn’t enough; what was really important was getting mentioned in the society columns, which would be read, presumably, by the next level of people you hoped to impress. Salyer had his own PR consultant. So did the craniofacial foundation, as did the Humana Advanced Surgery Institutes, where Salyer was doing his work. It was as if Ken and Marcy and their expanding circle of friends were living in a vast hall of mirrors, staring at themselves staring at each other.
In 1987 Salyer and Marcy changed the name of the foundation to the National Craniofacial Foundation to reflect their ever-enlarging vision. Owing in no small part to Marcy’s feverish promotion, Ken Salyer was earning a terrific amount of money. In 1978 his practice had grossed $200,000, according to Marcy. Two years later that had more than doubled. By 1985, when he performed some 2,500 plastic surgeries, including 500 craniofacial cases, he grossed $1 million.
Marcy and Ken had no trouble spending it. Their elegant home was tucked into a wooded side street off of Turtle Creek. They had a staff of five: a runner for Ken’s office, a houseboy, a yardman, a maid, and a full-time chef. They had a getaway house at Lake Dallas. Marcy had a three-carat wedding ring and a Rolex watch. She was one of the first people in Dallas to have a car phone in her BMW. The Salyers ate out continually, at tony places like Beau Nash, the Mansion, San Simeon, and Sfuzzi. Marcy spent a fortune on clothes. In 1983 her entire $30,000 salary from Ken’s practice went to clothes and jewelry. The following year she asked Ken to double her salary, and she spent all of that too. “I wasn’t buying five-thousand-dollar outfits, but I wanted a different outfit for every event,” she says. One acquaintance remembers going with Marcy to Turtletique, a high-priced boutique, and watching her drop $17,000 in half an hour. “She strolled in as if she were Lupe Murchison walking into Neiman’s,” the acquaintance says. “Everyone was ‘honey’ and ‘sweetie’ and ‘dear.’” For Marcy, spending also became her fundraising philosophy: You have to display money to attract it.
If Marcy won admirers for her passion, she also put off many others by preening and putting on airs. When she walked in a room, she needed to be the center of attention. She was constantly late, often by as much as an hour, even to board meetings. One friend remembers Marcy showing up half an hour late for a dinner party at her own home. And she was self-indulgent: A publicist recalls meeting her at the Crescent Spa while she was in a bathrobe, with wet hair, getting a pedicure.
Her social life was a frenetic series of luncheons, teas, meetings, receptions, and galas. Merely getting ready for a big event was an exhaustive procedure. A makeup expert would do Marcy’s face. Another friend would match her clothes and jewelry. Sometimes she would spend five hours having her hair and face and clothes coordinated. Keeping up appearances was paramount—social appearances, her own physical appearance, the appearance that she and Ken Salyer were happily married. What was odd was that if you were to ask Marcy the point of it all, she would not have hesitated to say “the children.” Yet appearances were what the craniofacial foundation was about—not only reconfiguring the malformed faces of the children she strove to help, but also Marcy’s own need to keep up a facade. She could relate to the children because their social acceptance depended on appearances, just as hers did. But she was not physically deformed; she was profoundly insecure. She rationalized her frantic behavior by saying it was all for the cause, but in the end the cause was really Marcy Rogers.
Meanwhile, her marriage was disintegrating. Ken and Marcy were unhappy almost from the start of their married life. Ken declined to be interviewed for this article, but from Marcy’s perspective, it was his emotional distance that exacerbated her insecurities. The more desperate she became, the more furiously she threw herself into building up the foundation and Ken’s practice, hoping to recapture his affection. But it didn’t work. At night, they would quarrel at the dinner table and Marcy would walk out. She would get in her BMW and drive up and down the Dallas North Tollway, dropping quarters in the tollbooths and brooding. Once when she and Ken were in Hawaii, she asked him for an evaluation of her face. Where did she fit, on a scale of one to ten? He took a long, measured look at her and answered, “Five.” He told her he could improve her looks by taking out the anti-Mongoloid slant in her eyes, shoring up her cheekbones, correcting her overbite. “It was like a stab,” Marcy says, “that I was only a five.”
In June 1987 Marcy sued Ken Salyer for divorce, citing incompatibility and alleging infidelity. They reached a settlement of $475,000: $175,000 to be paid immediately, and the remainder over five years. A year and a half later, the divorce was final.
MARCY WAS DETERMINED THAT NO ONE should know how much her wrecked marriage had cost her. She wanted to socialize in the same circles and live the same lifestyle as before. After the breakup, she moved into a small home in University Park. But every time she passed by the house where she and Ken used to live, she says, “I thought, ‘What’s wrong with this picture?’ There he was, living in the lap of luxury, and I was living in a dump. I hadn’t done anything wrong.” So after a few months she leased a handsome townhouse in Turtle Creek. Later she moved into a big house in Highland Park, where her monthly rent was $2,800. She traded her BMW for a champagne-colored Cadillac Allante. She continued to pick up the tab for her friends. She sent flowers. She bought more and more clothes. She dated younger men and lavished gifts on them. For two of them she cosigned notes on cars, a Lincoln Continental and a Porsche.
At the same time, the National Craniofacial Foundation was foundering. Ken Salyer had withdrawn his financial support, and the foundation wasn’t making up the difference in outside donations and was falling into arrears. Marcy was certain that Ken was trying to sabotage her. Although she acknowledges that she herself contributed to her problems, she views Ken as the underlying agent of her downfall. And in a way she has hit upon a sliver of the truth, for everything that happened to Marcy over the next three years in Dallas was really a continuation of the feud that broke out between them when their marriage fell apart.
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